Mike Flanagan’s ‘Dark Tower’ Plan Is to Be Faithful

If you’re wondering what big spin Mike Flanagan will bring to his long-gestating Dark Tower TV series , it sounds like he won’t have one.

On a recent episode of the Process Unlocked series, he mentioned potentially cracking the code for this show. “You do the books,” he said, which is probably funny to a lot of people at the moment. As his recent Carrie series has shown, not all his adaptations stick close to the source material, and Nicolaj Arcel’s 2017 Dark Tower film infamously took liberties that didn’t please fans.

But with this one, Flanagan said he’s hoping to tell the story by “just doing them, and in order” via five TV seasons and two standalone movies. While he sure “enjoys the remixing and taking something apart,” he considers Tower an “incredibly daunting” task. Because of that, he’s aiming to keep things true to the page, because Stephen King “starts this giant worldbuilding, potentially overwhelming story with two people in a landscape without detail. It’s the simplest start.”

“‘The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed,'” he continued, quoting the first Dark Tower’s opening line. “It’s two characters; there’s a clear objective. One is running away, one is pursuing, and it’s a desert. […] King did it right.” Whatever “little changes” are made, Flanagan has that setup as his guide and knows it, since he said “70%” of his job has already been handled by King.

At the moment, Dark Tower fans will have to wait for Flanagan’s schedule to clear up so he can get on adapting the books. It’s not just the future of Carrie he has to think about; The Exorcist: Martyrs hits theaters next year, and he’s also helping Henry Cavill bring Warhammer 40K to Prime Video, too.

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